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Kenny Sargent
Kenneth (Kenny) Sargent (1906 – 1969) was an American saxophone player, singer and disc jockey. Sargent was the Casa Loma Orchestra's primary vocalist. He also played the saxophone with the band. He left the orchestra band in 1943 to begin a career as a disc jockey. He was a well known radio personality in the Dallas, Texas area at radio stations KLIF and WRR in the 1950s and 1960s....(read more at Wikipedia) With the increasing interest in pop music history, particularly in the USA, Kenny Sargent's music (and that of Glen Gray's Casa Loma Orchestra) can be heard today on CD reissue collections and radio shows such as The Big Broadcast (WFUV, New York) as well as internet radio stations such as Radio Dismuke (Fort Worth, Texas) and Cladrite Radio ("Vintageville, USA"). He had a smooth, straightforward singing style, free from the dated mannerisms which make some 1920s and 1930s male pop singers difficult listening for modern audiences. A baritone whose ballad-singing appealed strongly to female listeners, his voice also proved an asset in his DJ career. According to one account, he suffered a heart attack while on the air in 1969 and died later in hospital. His death was reported in Melody Maker in February 1970https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1i_gXM1v12lUbLGYUhxzySbTm1VjOzLYz. Links to Peel There was an unlikely crossing of paths in Dallas in 1961, when Kenny Sargent, who had turned to disc jockeying when the big band swing era in which he had made his name went into decline, was hosting an all-night radio programme sponsored by American Airlines on station WRR in Dallas. On Monday evenings he was preceded by a young British newcomer, John Ravenscroft, who had been hired by the station's Jim Lowe (a good friend of Sargent's) to present the second half of the R&B show Kat's Karavan. In Margrave of the Marshes Peel states that he did not listen to anything on WRR apart from Kat's Karavan, as he found it "even for the times, a curiously old-fashioned station, broadcasting middle-of-the-road music that was really middle-of-the-road" (p. 151). Even if he did feature dance band, big band and swing music selections in the Pig's Big 78 slot of his later shows, he is not known to have played any tracks by Kenny Sargent or the Casa Loma Orchestra. However, he did play a very brief "cover" version of Glen Gray's Casa Loma Orchestra's hit "For You" (with Sargent on vocal), as parodied by the Mothers of Invention on their 1967 album Absolutely Free. Kenny Sargent also worked for KLIF in Dallas as a Top 40 DJ in the mid-1950s, when the station was one of the first to adopt the format: Peel was later to find employment there as a "Beatles expert". Sargent was not the only singer-turned-DJ Peel would encounter; in Britain, Sam Costa and Jack Jackson were both ex-dance band singers (Jackson was also a bandleader) who took to radio work when the big band era gave way to skiffle, trad jazz and rock and roll, and were active on Radio Luxembourg and the BBC in the 1960s. One of Peel's early Radio 1 colleagues, Jimmy Young, was also a former singer - although one with a much less distinguished career than Kenny Sargent, Sessions *None Other Shows Played *None External Links *Wikipedia Category:Artists Category:People